It is true there are cases in which, if we confine ourselves to the effects of the first order, the good will have an incontestable preponderance over the evil. Were the offence considered only under this point of view, it would not be easy to assign any good reasons to justify the rigour of the laws. Every thing depends upon the evil of the second order; it is this which gives to such actions the character of crime, and which makes punishment necessary. Let us take, for example, the physical desire of satisfying hunger. Let a beggar, pressed by hunger, steal from a rich man's house a loaf, which perhaps saves him from starving, can it be possible to compare the good which the thief acquires for himself, with the evil which the rich man suffers? … It is not on account of the evil of the first order that it is necessary to erect these actions into offences, but on account of the evil of the second order.
[27]

It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.

The word utility is used to mean general well-being or happiness, and Mill's view is that utility is the consequence of a good action. Utility, within the context of utilitarianism, refers to people performing actions for social utility. With social utility, he means the well-being of many people. Mill's explanation of the concept of utility in his work, Utilitarianism, is that people really do desire happiness, and since each individual desires their own happiness, it must follow that all of us desire the happiness of everyone, contributing to a larger social utility. Thus, an action that results in the greatest pleasure for the utility of society is the best action, or as Jeremy Bentham, the founder of early Utilitarianism put it, as the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Mill not only viewed actions as a core part of utility, but as the directive rule of moral human conduct. The rule being that we should only be committing actions that provide pleasure to society. This view of pleasure was hedonistic, as it pursued the thought that pleasure is the highest good in life. This concept was adopted by Jeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism, and can be seen in his works. According to Mill, good actions result in pleasure, and that there is no higher end than pleasure. Mill says that good actions lead to pleasure and define good
character
. Better put, the justification of character, and whether an action is good or not, is based on how the person contributes to the concept of social utility. In the long run the best proof of a good character is good actions; and resolutely refuse to consider any mental disposition as good, of which the predominant tendency is to produce bad conduct. In the last chapter of Utilitarianism, Mill concludes that justice, as a classifying factor of our actions (being just or unjust) is one of the certain moral requirements, and when the requirements are all regarded collectively, they are viewed as greater according to this scale of "social utility" as Mill puts it.

Over the past six years, as I’ve built a UX team from a solo practice to a team of 11, I’ve seen how design research can greatly influence product development. Early on, we had little time for customer interviews or usability tests. We were mostly shooting from the hip, listening to customer support, and revising on the fly.

We now do scores of usability tests, user interviews, and competitive analysis, and we create detailed reports summarizing our findings. But this brought us to a new problem: without a way to preserve and combine our results, our insights quickly slipped into the hazy distance as documents got lost on a hard drive, or ignored by someone in a different department.

We ended up living in a
Groundhog Day
research loop, asking the same questions and rarely building upon what we already knew.

Now we need connections—a way to pull together disparate data points, qualitative and quantitative data, and long histories of research into a central clearinghouse that can be shared, searched, and maintained by different teams. After years on a research treadmill, that’s exactly what we’ve started doing at MailChimp—and far from being just a data solution, open access to this information has strengthened the connections between teams, and supported a general culture of inquiry.

Customer feedback streams into my inbox in spades from a form on the
MailChimp website
. Hundreds of emails offer ideas for new features or ways to make things better. I love reading them, but last summer I started to feel overwhelmed. I was reading hundreds of emails daily, many of which had useful feedback, but weren’t worthy of adding to our roadmap. Maybe down the road an issue would reach critical mass, but until then they sat in limbo.

It was choking my productivity, and making my head spin.
A friend of mine
who’s helped many people tame their inbox and prioritize their work life recommended I simply nuke all of the emails and shut down the form. “If you can’t process the information, then stop wasting your time!” But my gut told me there was value in the feedback; I just wasn’t sure how to use it.